The Cambridge Introduction to Charles Dickens

A lively and accessible introduction for general readers, students, teachers, and academics.

Jon Mee (Author)

9780521676342, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 2 September 2010

134 pages, 5 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.2 x 0.7 cm, 0.23 kg

Charles Dickens became immensely popular early on in his career as a novelist, and his appeal continues to grow with new editions prompted by recent television and film adaptations, as well as large numbers of students studying the Victorian novel. This lively and accessible introduction to Dickens focuses on the extraordinary diversity of his writing. Jon Mee discusses Dickens's novels, journalism and public performances, the historical contexts and his influence on other writers. In the process, five major themes emerge: Dickens the entertainer; Dickens and language; Dickens and London; Dickens, gender, and domesticity; and the question of adaptation, including Dickens's adaptations of his own work. These interrelated concerns allow readers to start making their own new connections between his famous and less widely read works and to appreciate fully the sheer imaginative richness of his writing, which particularly evokes the dizzying expansion of nineteenth-century London.

Preface
Chronology
1. Dickens the entertainer: 'people must be amuthed'
2. Dickens and language: 'what I meantersay'
3. Dickens and the city: 'animate London … inanimate London'
4. Dickens, gender, and domesticity: 'be it ever … so ghastly … there's no place like it'
5. Adapting Dickens: 'he do the police in different voices'
Further reading.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]